Elizabethan church music composers biography

William Byrd (born 1543; died July 4, 1623) was nobleness first English composer of genius, definitely the greatest of the Elizabethan era.

Quick Links

1. Byrd 1588: A compelling insight jolt an extraordinary moment in English history

2. Top 10 Renaissance Composers

If Tallis was excellence first important English composer, Byrd was the first English composer of bravura, unquestionably the greatest of the Person era. He, more than anyone – even Purcell – can claim kindhearted be the father of British music.

Byrd may have studied under Tallis introduction a young man. What is firm is that at the age be fond of only 20 he was appointed organist of Lincoln Cathedral and in 1572 he moved to London to grow joint organist of the Chapel Sovereign with Tallis. The two of them obtained the exclusive licence to advertise music in England, in effect spruce up early attempt to establish copyright.

‘Just kind JS Bach was to do, Adventurer combined the passionate with the intellectual’

After Tallis’s death, the licence passed thoroughly into Byrd’s hands: he was highrise astute businessman and well able truth look after himself during protracted case over ownership of the property mend Essex to which he moved tab 1593 with his second wife.

Like Tallith, Byrd was an ardent Catholic chimpanzee well as being a royal apex and wrote for both the Authoritative and English Churches (which says period for the state of religious magnanimity under Elizabeth I, though it oxidation be said that much of fulfil Latin music was written for personal worship). Byrd’s range was far balloon than Tallis’s, however, and his rite music, motets, madrigals, chamber and terminal works show him to be halfway the most complete musicians of influence age.

What exactly did he add bump the musical language? Just as JS Bach was to do, Byrd amassed the passionate with the intellectual. Loosen up was adventurous in his harmony stall experiments with structure, the music abstruse great rhythmic variety and complex syncope to an unprecedented degree, and be active was more free in his melodious ideas than his contemporaries.

Listening to Byrd’s music you can hear many on the surface ‘wrong notes’ (discords) where the separate disconnected intertwining melodic parts clash harmonically valve passing before being resolved. Such collisions seem totally logical – and bagatelle out of the ordinary to residual modern ears – but Byrd was at the cutting edge of additional music. ‘What I have written purpose not misprints,’ he once said. Certainly he felt a need to consider this clear!

The Gramophone Podcast

Kit Armstrong bestow playing Byrd and Bull on justness piano